Lucent¶

Lucent is a system for defining, validating, and resolving naming conventions.

Lucent holds everything together within a Codex, which contains Conventions (string templates made up of fields) and Rules (that define how fields should behave).

Why yet another string formatter?¶

There are existing solutions mostly used by the 3D animation community (Lucidity being a major influence for Lucent), all of which showed recurring limitations that justified building something new:

• Added everyday features: unified field validation, file discovery, cross-pattern conversion, incrementation, overrides, human-readable representations... All methods are available from a single Codex object, no extra code needed.
• Developer ergonomics: extra care was taken to make config files easy to write and easy to read, build a structure that allows autocompletion, and provide helpful error messages.
• Path handling: treating paths and strings as the same type leads to subtle bugs, since paths have OS-specific behaviors and character restrictions that plain strings don't.
• Python 3.9+ design: modern codebases shouldn't have to carry the weight of Python 2.7, especially since the VFX Reference Platform moved to Python 3 years ago.
• Performance at scale: individual string parsing is fast, but with hundreds of templates and thousands of files to resolve, unoptimized implementations add up quickly.